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Showing posts from October, 2012

Caffeine Is Not a Bioweapon

I got into a discussion with Yves Smith about caffeine here , and somehow my comment got eaten, so I'd like to finish it up here. She said about this Raw Story piece about a girl who allegedly died from drinking two Monster drinks in two days, "The FDA lapse here is terrible. Caffeine is extremely toxic. We just happen to get highly diluted doses in coffee and tea." I commented: Yves, your implication about caffeine is incorrect on several levels. Most Monster drinks have about 10 mg of caffeine per fluid ounce, which is much less than even drip coffee (18 mg/oz) and WAY less than espresso (51 mg/oz). ( Source ) The whole idea of dilution is misguided in any case. The relevant measurement for caffeine intoxication (and most poisoning generally) is the total amount taken, not the concentration. Concentration is something to worry about, as it can make a lethal dose easier to take on, but the main concern there is pure caffeine pills, not energy drinks which are mostl

George Bush Does Not Have a "Towering Legacy"

Jason Kuznicki has an annoying gloss on what is a mostly correct piece, "The Towering Legacy of George W. Bush." Here's the nut graf: Conventional wisdom errs when it says that George W. Bush was incompetent. He was a president of overwhelming influence, the most effective chief executive since FDR. We live in the world that W. created, for good or — mostly — for ill... It goes on about how one would expect. Yes, Obama has largely embraced the tyrannical Bush "security" regime. Unprecedented secrecy, unprecedented war on whistleblowers, illegal assassinations of American citizens with no due process, yes. All that is an extension of Bush's groundwork. But here's the thing—enormous power grabs do not make one competent. Bush failed to prevent 9/11, he ginned up a war on false pretenses for no reason , then got bogged down there and horribly bungled the occupation, then flailed ineffectively as New Orleans drowned. His Social Security scheme failed. Hi

The Econo-body Revisited

Matt Yglesias, notorious hater of metaphors , says they are the tools of Satan . And why? The answer, I presume, is that they can be super-good at instilling wrong or simplistic beliefs about things, and lazy journalists rely on them far too much. Nearly all political coverage, for example, is riddled with sports metaphors that fall to pieces on the most cursory examination. However, I think it would be folly to abandon metaphor completely. The reason they are so commonplace—and the reason they're can be so noxious—is that they're powerful . When people are teaching or learning something for the first time, it's an almost uncontrollable impulse to try and explain that thing in terms of other things people already understand. The human brain's capacity to   generalize, while dangerous, is surely a large part of its power. So anyway, some months ago I came up with this complicated metaphor for the economy: that it's like a human body. Here's a sample, if you

In Defense of Austerity as a Concept

Tyler Cowen posted this  aside yesterday: Now I am all for the UK trying ngdp targeting, or for that matter well-targeted fiscal policy, or both. I never favored their *tax increases*, often misleadingly labeled “austerity” for political reasons. We then had a short Twitter conversation where I failed to convince him that even though he just doesn't like tax increases going into the austerity box, he should run with it anyway because ain't no way you're dislodging that one from the discourse. But I chewed it over a bit more, and I really do not see where he's coming from. I would define austerity as "some combination of tax increases and spending cuts with the object of improving a government's balance sheet—meaning reducing debt or accumulating a surplus." And the reason everyone has been dumping on austerity for the last few years is that in a depressed economy (especially one in the Eurozone where the periphery has no control over monetary policy)

I Like this Political Strategy

Mockery is underrated. Glad to see the president agrees:

The Failure of the Liberal Idea Machine

I was talking to a colleague in the office the other day, critiquing the first presidential debate. He was talking about how Romney's responses were all organized around the theme of jobs, and Obama needed to calibrate his answers similarly. He suggested the lack of maintenance of the Bush years as a theme, something along the lines of how for 20 years we did nothing about spiraling cost of healthcare, didn't fix our education system or rotting infrastructure, and made no investments in renewable energy. I pointed out that he could also organize around the idea of economic stimulus, Keynesian or otherwise, that being the whole point of the Recovery Act, which prevented depression. "People don't want to hear about more government spending to hire a bunch of bureaucrats," he replied. "Trust me, they just don't." I assume my colleague, who is a lot more experienced than me, is probably correct about general belief. But I got to thinking, and more an

Movie Recommendation

The Torture of Solitary Confinement

Shane Bauer, one of the hikers who was imprisoned in Iran awhile back, investigated the conditions in the solitary confinement ward in a California prison: Read the full article here . Horrible.

A Bittersweet Milestone

So, more than a year after coming home, I've finally finished my last consumable product I brought back from South Africa—some shaving gel. It's strange to think back on those days, so vivid and yet so distant, sort of like remembering a movie I've seen a thousand times. Seems like it didn't happen to me but every detail is still perfectly clear in my mind. I will always remember my Peace Corps times as a grim failure, mostly, but it's finally starting to be tinged with a little fondness and nostalgia. Obviously, I don't shave that much. Also obviously, I'm super cheap. Not sure what's up with the Cyrillic.

Climate Change Is Simple (My Project Unveiled)

It's a Reid Gower -style illustration of a David Roberts talk , set to some music. Check it out: Probably pretty amateurish, but I figure video editing is a good skill to have and this is one of the best ways to learn. I got mostly finished with this days ago, but I've been obsessively tweaking it for probably too long and I'm starting to question my aesthetic judgement. I think the smart move is to just let it loose and see how my loyal readers react. So if you've got a few minutes, I'd very much appreciate any feedback, aesthetic, technical or otherwise.

Nutcase Mountain Bikers

Way more than I would ever be able to handle:

Jesse Osmun, Former Peace Corps Volunteer, Sentenced to 15 Years in Prison

Sorry for the downtime here, I've been working on a special project (about which more later). But as I promised last year , here's the latest news from the case of Jesse Osmun, the South Africa PCV who was arrested for sexually abusing children: A judge sentenced a former Peace Corps volunteer to 15 years in prison for abusing girls under the age of 6 in South Africa while he was a volunteer there, federal officials said. The sentencing was announced Thursday in a statement from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Jesse Osmun, 33, of Milford, Connecticut, joined the Peace Corps in 2010 and worked in a nongovernmental organization's AIDS center for children whose families had suffered or died from the disease, his attorney, Richard Meehan, Jr., told CNN Thursday. Osmun volunteered as a Web designer for the center and worked with older children in a "scout" program. While there, Osmun engaged in sexual acts with four girls, all under the age of 6, off

The Humans

Don't Blame the Baby Boomers for Everything

A perennially popular topic these days is blaming the Baby Boomers for screwing up the country. Here's the latest example : Ultimately, members of my father’s generation—generally defined as those born between 1946 and 1964—are reaping more than they sowed. They graduated smack into one of the strongest economic expansions in American history. They needed less education to snag a decent-salaried job than their children do, and a college education cost them a small fraction of what it did for their children or will for their grandkids. One income was sufficient to get a family ahead economically. Marginal federal income-tax rates have fallen steadily, with rare exception, since boomers entered the labor force; government retirement benefits have proliferated. At nearly every point in their lives, these Americans chose to slough the costs of those tax cuts and spending hikes onto future generations. The Dow Jones industrial average rose twelvefold from the time the first boomer

Laptop Screen Bleg

This is a picture of my laptop screen, which I bought new about a year ago. It's a Toshiba Satellite L755 with a dual-boot installation of Win 7 and Linux Mint 11. As you can see it's divided itself into thirds and swapped the left and right thirds. On the right side of each third it's got a few dozen pixel-wide vertical stripes each a pixel apart. It's doing it in both Windows and Linux, which makes me think it's a hardware problem, and probably in the chips somewhere. I can't find much help online, but a new computer would be a major expense I'd like to avoid if possible. Anyone got any advice?

Iran Should Get a Nuclear Deterrent as Fast as Possible

Glenn Greenwald says today what should be obvious by now: That Iran will use its nuclear weapons against the US and Israel is rather obviously the centerpiece of the fear-mongering campaign against Tehran, to build popular support for threats to launch an aggressive attack in order to prevent them from acquiring that weapon. So what, then, is the real reason that so many people in both the US and Israeli governments are so desperate to stop Iranian proliferation? Every now and then, they reveal the real reason: Iranian nuclear weapons would prevent the US from attacking Iran at will, and that is what is intolerable. It has become clear in the last decade that the United States is a deranged beast when it comes to the Middle East. We have done almost nothing good there, and killed hundreds of thousands of people, including many thousands of our own troops, in the service of making things worse there and here in practically every conceivable way. I still believe that on balance

Why TED Is Still Pretty Cool Sometimes

Ben Goldacre unloads on the medical-industrial complex: Not many places where you will hear that kind of baldly radical rhetoric widely displayed to an elite audience. You can pre-order his book here .